Exiles

Exiles is Joyce's solitary foray into drama, and it is as psychologically fierce as anything in Ulysses or A Portrait. The play follows Richard Rowan, a celebrated Irish writer returning to Dublin after twelve years of self-imposed exile in Rome. He comes back to find his common-law wife Bertha and his oldest friend Robert Hand waiting for him. But return is not the same as arrival. As the three orbit each other across a single night, Joyce dismantles the romantic mythology of the artist-as-exile, asking whether freedom is just another word for abandonment, and whether love can survive the回来的 of someone who has learned to hold himself apart. A second triangle involving Robert's cousin Beatrice Justice adds another layer of reckoning: the score between friends, the debts of the past, the question of who we become in the absence of those we left behind. Written in 1915 but not performed until 1970, Exiles is the key to Joyce's interior castle: it is the work where he finally wrote his way out of the question that haunts all his fiction. For readers who want to understand the man behind the monuments, this is where the veil lifts.